turtledovefandomcom-20200216-history
Talk:Alice Hathaway Lee
Ah--the end of an error. And it is your wife, TR, who will lead us away from it at long last. Turtle Fan 22:18, September 27, 2009 (UTC) :In reviewing HFR via amazon: Roosevelt maintained some sort of relationship with Alice Lee. I can't find anything that say she spurned him, but rather that there was a "don't ask don't tell" understanding when it came to him having sex with other women. :He also didn't lose an election. He actually says that if he'd stayed in New York, he might have run. TR 19:08, January 4, 2012 (UTC) ::So what did he head west for, then? :::I have to review, but based on what I was able see from Amazon, I think "because he wanted to" and "with the South seceeded, going west was a 'thing you did'". TR 17:01, January 5, 2012 (UTC) ::::Because he wanted: Well it would certainly be hard to keep Theodore from doing what he wanted, but this seems like it would interfere with the path through life he would presumably have been groomed for and still seemed interested in. In OTL he had to go battle his demons, here it would seem he's just dicking around. ::::Because it's the thing you did: Ah, like Catholics in (mainly) Spain and Portugal in the 16th century who responded to Protestant victories in northern Europe by aggressively proselityzing (sp?) on other continents. Maybe Roosevelt felt the need to be involved in this to redeem himself from the taint of a Confederate grandfather, even though his mother had already rejected her father's activities when the war was on. ::::Well, if I remember one thing from Jared Diamond, it's that a country is better off with a latitudinal axis than a longitudinal one. Turtle Fan 19:40, January 5, 2012 (UTC) ::In OTL it was to help him get over the loss of her, and in the old version of the article it was for the same purpose but in a different way. I had quite liked the idea of the forces that shaped TR remaining intact but Alice here having a softer fate. Oh well. :::Well, Amazon search has its limits. HFR is one of the few 191 books I have literally at hand, so maybe a thorough going over is in order. Help clean up a few articles, punch up the references, squeeze out a few more historicals.... ::::That would be nice. I've been meaning to reread GotS flat-out for similar reasons, but that's easier said than done, as I'll explain below. Turtle Fan 19:40, January 5, 2012 (UTC) :::Anyway, there may be more to it than that, but the once reference to Alice I can find via search makes it clear they have some sort of relationship. And since a blind eye to whoring is part of it, it's probably an engagement. TR 17:01, January 5, 2012 (UTC) ::Earlier this week I read a very forgettable book about William Howard Taft. It got a fair number of things wrong, among them overstating Taft's affection for his henpecking wife, and likewise overstating the severity of her 1909 stroke. It did occur to me, however, that all three first wives of the Progressive presidents suffered from debilitating medical crises at young ages (relatively--Ellen Louise Wilson was 54, despite apparently dying a good deal earlier in TL-191). :::A biography? Name and author? I know you are saying it's forgettable, but it may be that a forgetable bio is what we're stuck with for a while, and my quest to read a bio of every president is an ongoing one. TR 17:01, January 5, 2012 (UTC) ::::A novel, actually, and . . . a strange one at that. Taft 2012 by Jason Heller. It could almost be considered an AH, though only technically: Taft vanishes from the face of the Earth on the morning his term expires, right as the Wilson inaugural festivities are getting under way. He resurfaces in November 2011 (no one ever explains how or why, or even thinks to ask) and is soon getting into politics again. So I guess it's more of a satire than anything. ::::It comes out on January 17. I got an advanced copy as part of Amazon's Vine program. I was thinking it would be an interesting thought experiment to skip a century of American history and look at 2012 through a 1912 lens, but instead it's just a pretty stupid book. Its main advantages are that it's very short and very light, allowing me to plow through it in a weekend. Vine's really a double edged sword: I order books with very little info available on them beyond the very flattering promotional material provided by the publisher, and by ordering them I'm committing myself to reading and reviewing them. If I don't enjoy a book I'm stuck reading something I don't like and with as many as three or four such books a month, I'm always running short of time to read books I've actually chosen for me--which is one reason I keep shelving plans to reread GotS. ::::Anyway, there are only eight reviews on the book's Amazon page at this point, and mine's one of them, if you want my full thoughts on it or a more detailed description. (It's in the two-star section.) The author lists two Taft biographies as having been very useful to him in his research, if you want to read a Taft bio that badly, but I don't remember what they are offhand and I've already misplaced my copy of the book. (I did rummage around for it a bit in the hopes that I could be more helpful.) They were older books that have been out for a while, and given how much liberty Teller took with history, I'm not sure how much weight his endorsement should carry. Turtle Fan 19:40, January 5, 2012 (UTC) ::And on the topic of First Ladies meeting unfortunate ends, another book I read last week informed me that, in 1892, Benjamin Harrison did not actively campaign for reelection because his wife Caroline was dying and they wanted to spend as much time together as they could. His opponent, once-and-future President Grover Cleveland, responded by cancelling almost all of his own campaign appearances so the Harrisons could spend their final weeks together in peace and not feel pressure to respond to Cleveland's speechifying. I was really quite touched to read that, given how vitriolic the two men had been toward one another in 1888. Turtle Fan 00:36, January 5, 2012 (UTC) :::I hate to admit it, but that reminds of that one crappy board user (or maybe it was a Norton board user?) who was adamant that Cleveland HAD to have been president in 191 because he was too good a guy not to have been. TR ::::I don't remember that. Cleveland was a good guy, certainly, and it's a real shame that he gets so little credit for having been so in popular histories and especially the popular imagination. ::::Odd that presidents between Lincoln, or maybe Grant, and Roosevelt, or maybe McKinley, all toil in such obscurity. Amusingly, on two separate occasions I've been drawn into very serious arguments with people who absolutely insisted that James Garfield and Chester Arthur, respectively, did not exist. Turtle Fan 19:40, January 5, 2012 (UTC) Needing citations From the lit comm: "she appears to have been deceased well in advance of the Great War". Is there hard reason within TL191 to believe this? How much is just speculation?JonathanMarkoff (talk) 20:44, August 5, 2016 (UTC) :bump.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 21:37, January 3, 2018 (UTC) ::The fact that she died of Bright's Disease in OTL in 1884, coupled with a complete lack of references to her after HFR, probably. Not explicit that I could find. TR (talk) 21:53, January 3, 2018 (UTC) :::A lack of reference to politicians' wives is not surprising. Harriet Blaine is never mentioned, for example. The current lit com on Alice seems just a bit too speculative. We should probably change it to "we don't know."JonathanMarkoff (talk) 22:09, January 3, 2018 (UTC) ::::Or ditch it altogether. TR (talk) 23:09, January 3, 2018 (UTC) ::::I will say, the latest changes by Jonathan are for the better. ML4E (talk) 19:24, January 4, 2018 (UTC)